I'm still waking up; I got this idea in my head that the answer had something to do with how they governed... So I was thinking--both of them were described as centrists, but there were other presidents so categorized...

Then I realized I had failed to grasp the core of the challenge! Silly me... Guess I'll keep working on it and looking here for clues from the more astute participants...

I'm getting ticked off at Shortz. His puzzles from the likes of Sam Loyd were great. Puzzles submitted by some, if not most, listeners have not been so great for a few years. I had a few other remarks which I wrote previously, but GOOGLE refused my log-in and erased them - probably a good thing. Blaine's site does thing right with a good group.

Don, I invented calling people maroons! About three years ago! I'm sure I wasn't the first and I'm sure I won't be the last. I guess it's like that saying, Great, or relatively great, or somewhat not so poor, minds think kinda sorta alike or rather similar or something...

Oh, and all you U.S. citizens make sure you get out and VOTE! Not gonna tell you who to vote for but please use your brains to make a decision. Don't let others tell you how to vote and don't be dissuaded by something as trivial as the idea that the candidate has a funny name...

Geri, it's somewhat difficult to give you a clue that helps without just giving the answer away. But I can tell you that there's something deceptive about the wording of the challenge. It might help if you Googled lists of the presidents' names, looking for the most complete list you can find. Another avenue (which can even yield the solution, but only if you dig and look at a few different sites--but it might jog your brain in the right direction before that...) is to Google presidential name trivia...

Right now as you struggle to find the answer, your brain may be like a hurricane of activity, but you need to gravitate toward the calm area that comes with any hurricane... You know where that is, right?

phredp, I didn't say I was the first to coin the term. Don't know where it originated. But I used it probably three years ago posting on Craigslist's Rants and Raves; I was satirizing a post that contained an amazing abundance of errors in grammar and spelling... I'm not consciously aware of having heard of it before than.

I like the idea that someone could be living on an island, cut off from the rest of the world, and manage to "invent" something that's been around for ages, say... peanut butter?

Funny you mention the 3 stooges. I do remodels so I frequent places like Home Depot and Lowes. Every single time I pick up anything like a long board or a piece of rain gutter and put it up on my shoulder, I think of them.

Okay, I'm officially (and briefly) hijacking this blog. It is, for the moment, the Etymology of Obscure Pejoratives blog.

Googled connections between "maroon" and the 3 stooges. Didn't find any. Doesn't mean they're not there; might not have looked hard enough. But did discover that Bugs Bunny apparently used it more than once, as part of a recurring shtick of mispronouncing insults.

Also, found something on Daily Kos about someone believing that "nimrod" was first popularized by a character on Cheers. Not true. I remember that one from elementary school. There was a comic strip in the papers back then called "Dondi," and it cracked me up that there was a series of Dondi strips that featured a bad guy who hung out in a submarine by that name...

Hugh, still looking for that one, but discovered that Ethelbert, "officially," is the name represented by the initial "E" in Wile E. Coyote. He even had relatives, such as uncle Kraft E. Coyote, with that middle name as well. This from a 1973 Looney Tunes comic book

The American Heritage Dictionary offers two distinct definitions of a nimrod -- either a hunter, or a person regarded as silly or foolish. The dictionary goes on to explain that the second meaning probably originated with the cartoon character Bugs Bunny. The wily Bugs used the term in its original sense to refer to dithering hunter Elmer Fudd, whom he called a "poor little Nimrod." Over time, however, the "hunter" meaning got dropped, and the "dithering" connotation stuck.

Geri, did you see my hint from a few days ago? I think if you take that last short paragraph and play around with it and do word-association stuff with it you might have the figurative light bulb suddenly appear over your head...

But don't go to extremes... That's no way to govern.

If all else fails, do this: take a piece of paper and write their names down. NOT the way Will presented their names...

There are several other presidents (e.g. jAMes MAdison, groVEr clEVeland) that would also have the property noted by Ben. The puzzle states that Clinton and Reagan have a unique quality not shared by other presidents.